The 72nd Virtual Annual General Meeting of ICANN, which ended on 29 October 2021, confirmed a representative of the eco Association and a representative of DE-CIX in two central bodies of the organisation: Thomas Rickert, Leader of the eco Names & Numbers Competence Group, will be taking over one of the two seats of the Internet Service Providers & Connectivity Provider Constituency (ISPCP) in the Council of the Generic Name Supporting Organization (GNSO) for the next two years. He succeeds Osvaldo Novoa, Deputy General Manager of Antel – Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones from Uruguay. The members of the ISPCP thanked Osvaldo Novoa for two successful years on the GNSO Council being intensively involved in the Third Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT3).
“The GNSO Council is the central body at ICANN that manages the development of policies for generic top-Level domains. There are numerous topics on the agenda such as Whois, data protection and combatting DNS abuse, where the interests of eco members and infrastructure providers in general will be brought into the discussion,” says Thomas Rickert.
The ISPCP also welcomed Wolf-Ulrich Knoben for another year in his function as Chair of the Constituency, who is involved in this working group as a representative of DE-CIX, is advocating not only for the interests of the world’s largest Internet Exchange, but for the entire industry of Internet and connectivity providers and operators of Internet backbone networks. Susan Mohr, the Director International Government Affairs at eco member Lumen was elected for the vice-chair position and succeeds Jennifer Taylor Hodges.
ICANN: Central contact for domains on the Internet
The ISPCP is represented in the GNSO Council through the Commercial Stakeholder Group, which bundles various stakeholders at ICANN. This means that representatives of eco and DE-CIX are still present in central committees of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as experts and central contact persons. In these committees, they will be working on coordinating the allocation of unique names and addresses on the Internet, improving access to the Internet worldwide, and making the Internet as a whole fit for the future.
